Friday, January 25, 2013

Ill Fevers

I don't really understand quite why it is
that team games, or any sort of sporting event, which includes chess and
expositions of five year olds who can spell, or Dog Shows, have to be
associated with news on the television. Nor do I quite understand
why it is that news programs on the television often include interviews
with people who have written books. And when clothing enters the
content of news programming it becomes a malediction upon senses which I
finally rebel against by changing channels. Which is an error,
because 'product' is on sale everywhere, and I find myself yearning for
the repartee and boisterousness of a Soviet barrack. And whenever I hear
a news presenter wish me 'a good weekend,' or 'a happy holiday,' or make
some similar asinine remark, I gravitate toward an understanding which
includes the certain knowledge that I should probably entrust the
television set and its food stained handheld device to a landfill
somewhere in Tennessee .

"Nothing to say today," doesn't appear to be a
'news' option. A consequence of this, on a being that attempts to be present in
the world at least while eating his supper and who would be quite happy to
discover there was "Nothing to say today," is that I find myself increasingly
unable to determine 'trustworthiness' in news sources As a result I
no longer hear the word news as something in and of itself, and instead I find
that before ever I pay any attention to what is being said, I first have to know
who is saying whatever it is I am supposed to be hearing. And when I
finally make this determination, the content of what might actually be usefully
said, becomes increasingly irrelevant as I await the inevitable skirmish with
the handheld device. Nor, I begin to realize, am I the only one to have
undergone what has to be some form of lobotomy by television. Or it could be the
onset of particularly nasty manifestation of Stendhal's Syndrome, which in
it's kinder form is a psychotic reaction to a surfeit of Florentine Art,
combined with Jerusalem Syndrome, which in it's kinder form is a delusional
psychosis triggered by a visit to Jerusalem.